ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour brought to you by gravity. It's one

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of the fundamental forces of the universe and also the force that's most [Woman walking down steps falls overs]

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likely to make us look silly in public.. A bowling ball, a feather and a marble are

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dropped from a given height within a vacuum chamber. which of those objects

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experiences the greatest acceleration? And here are the potential answers

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(Mumbles)

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All right, let's imagine what would actually happen

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in this situation we'd probably begin climbing to the top of the Empire State [Man climbing up huge staircase]

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Building and well on second thought we'd take the elevator (laughs)

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Come on we're carrying a bowling ball here people. Plus it's like a bajillion flights of stairs.

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Anyway at the top we'd go to the observation deck and pull the bowling

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ball the marble and the feather out of the bag, we look around and make sure

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there's no security around... don't forget that and then we'd give them a shove.

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Now what would happen well the marble and the bowling ball would drop right away, the [Marble and bowling ball have already landed and the feather is floating down]

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feather well it won't be going quite so fast. But that's not because gravity is

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slower for the feather after all gravity is a constant the reason the feather

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falls slower than the bowling ball or the marble is because the feathers shape

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and mass make it more susceptible to air resistance like its densities different.

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As all of these objects fall gravity is pulling them down and the air is pushing

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back against them, but in a vacuum chamber with no air at all, all three of

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these things will fall at the exact same rate. Now the bowling ball is definitely [Objects are dropped in a vacuum chamber]

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falling with more force which will be obvious when it hits the ground, splat..

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But the acceleration they all experience is the same: 9.8 meters per second squared

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here on earth that's the acceleration of gravity for feathers, for bowling balls

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and for everything else. So the correct answer here is D the acceleration is equal

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for all of the objects and we don't have to worry about air resistance in a

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vacuum. Oh and please remember that whole dropping things from the top of the [Police have the man in handcuffs]

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Empire State Building scenario was just to show how things work, we shouldn't go

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around dropping things off of building even if it's for science... [Bowling ball lands on securities head]

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